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Barna Howard was born and raised in a quintessential Midwest town. His youth in Eureka, Missouri was pure Americana – the sort of childhood that inspired E.T.-era Spielberg – baseball cards in his bicycle spokes, flying freely down Main Street and through neighbors’ backyards.

However, much of Barna’s story is not unique to his hometown, and, like most of small town America, Eureka has lost some of that charm over time. Main Street has changed, kids don’t run around quite so carelessly, and in an almost laughably cruel twist, his childhood home was knocked down in favor of a Walmart parking lot.

After high school, Howard moved north to study animation in one cold and windy city and then east for love in another. Years later, he blindly followed two friends to the Northwest, crossing the Rockies for the first time, in search of inspiration, opportunity and a fresh start.

Barna’s self-titled debut chronicled these moves as he struggled with the contrast between his small town upbringing and these big city wanderings. The album was met with critical acclaim and underground success, partly thanks to an opportunely placed song in the hit indie film, Drinking Buddies. One critic even likened him to some “lost genius of the 60’s.”

The songs on Barna Howard’s second album, Quite A Feelin’, ruminate on his relationship with home. Now entrenched in Portland, Oregon, many of the album’s tracks immortalize and reflect on the Eureka he once knew, while others focus on the relationships that define his new home out west. Small town life has long been celebrated in country and folk music, but Barna’s knack for capturing his own deeply personal nostalgia resonates in a rarely universal way.

Growing up in rural Ohio, Ryan Oxford never really experienced any sort of formative music subculture. His friends back then were more likely to drive a tractor to school than to host house shows. He’d watch MTV’s 120 Minutes, but rarely connected with anything he heard. Instead, his interest grew independently from more personal experiences.

He remembers being strangely drawn to the smell of the old RCA turntable in the attic of his grandparents’ duplex. There was also the deep admiration he felt watching his dad embarrass his sister with shameless air guitar solos to Bowie’s “Five Years”. Perhaps that performance inspired his own debut - at age six, dancing to “These Boots Are Made for Walking” in front of his mom’s full-length mirror with an audience he didn’t exactly know was there.

As Oxford got older and moved away from home, this interest became an obsession. His self-education started in Akron, listening to salvaged, broken and moldy 45s at Jimi Imij’s unofficial Ohio Historical Music Society. From there, inspired by reading about how Brian Wilson stayed in the studio to write and record Pet Sounds while the rest of the Beach Boys were touring, he spent his entire tax return on an 8-track tape machine and taught himself the only way he knew how - by making mistake after mistake. Ten years later, Oxford’s a producer, composer and songwriter based in Portland, Oregon. He lives in a loft above his studio, Color Therapy Recording, where he recorded, produced and mixed his debut album.

Fa Fa Fa Fired is a long time coming for Oxford, a testament to his determined, singular path. It’s full of twangy guitars, sassy backing vocals and the sweet hiss of reel-to-reel tape that he still can’t shake. The songs are playful, charming, melancholy and honest. They’re mostly about being dumb and in love and sometimes just about being dumb. The album was recorded with help from Dominik Schmidt and features Christian Blunda (Mean Jeans, Patsy's Rats), Nick Dewitt (Pretty Girls Make Graves), Scott Hartlaub (Jessica Lea Mayfield) and Arjan Miranda (Black Mountain, Strand of Oaks).

Fa Fa Fa Fired is available now digitally and on limited edition white cassette.

Kele Goodwin has spent his life in three places: in Juneau, Alaska; on the Navajo Nation; and in the misty Pacific Northwest. He makes music that sings from bone marrow, from a life and landscape alternately charted and lost, crushed and rebuilt. It is music made familiar by the experience of pain and its lessons. It is music to live by.

Goodwin’s debut album Hymns was produced by Sean Ogilvie of Musé Méchanique and features guest performances from Laura Gibson, Alela Diane, Ogilvie himself, Douglas Jenkins of The Portland Cello Project, and many others. His lyrics are both observation and prayer, delicate lines built on an architecture of gratitude and disbelief of the world around him.